Charged lepton flavor violation (CLFV) is an interesting phenomenon to investigate in going beyond the Standard Model (BSM). This direction of investigation also inspires a new look at the idea of mu and tau being excitations of the electron. For this, the electron is required to have a substructure that is held together by some potential. However, even the simplest model of a two-body substructure has several troubling issues. First, a relativistically covariant formulation of such a bound system is non-trivial. However, this has been resolved in the past in a different context. Second, a consistent field theory of composite objects is needed to handle this model of leptons with substructure. This has also been done in the past in a different context. Third, the large observed mass ratios of the three charged leptons rule out binding potentials that depend only on the relative positions of constituents. Here it is shown that a concept similar to the "running coupling constant" of strong interactions generates a model that fits these ratios very well.